


two foreign shores

by GoldenThreads



Series: Autotomy [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Blind Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt No Comfort, Illustrations, M/M, Major Character Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:02:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23438893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/pseuds/GoldenThreads
Summary: There are only two residents in the Garreg Mach infirmary, and both of them are model patients.One has a room without windows. He is very quiet, speaking only when spoken to, and hardly even then. He admits no visitors, though there are none to admit.One has a room overlooking the gardens, and every morning the nurse cracks open the window so sweet spring can slip inside. He spends most days with his face turned to the sun, as if it calls to him, as if he calls it home to feast on his kindling. The visitors flow through as a babbling brook, and no one ever thinks him silent, though his words all brittle and bold shatter at a touch.You are healing well, says the nurse, and the residents laugh in their separate rooms:there is no healing from this.Hubert draws down the sun, but he is not the one who burns. [Autotomy prelude, Hubert pov, The Incident & its Aftermath]
Relationships: Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra
Series: Autotomy [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1686121
Comments: 29
Kudos: 195





	two foreign shores

**Author's Note:**

> I come bearing a brief treat from the depths of overtime hell! Huge shout outs to Unrivaled & Nuanta for their beta/cheerleader work as I whipped this up. It takes place prior to Autotomy Chapter 1 in the timeline, but likely won't make any sense without reading that first, apologies.
> 
> Godly illustration by the inimitable [@Diddlydang1](https://twitter.com/Diddlydang1)!!
> 
> Additional Content Warnings for unresolved internalized ableism & Hubert-typical violence, including but not limited to: Vestra Bad Parenting/Child Abuse, self-harm for purposes of knowledge acquisition, description of injuries and their medical treatment, general murdery thoughts

  


* * *

  


At eleven, Hubert took an ink brush to the meat of his thigh and traced out a half dozen squares of unblemished skin. He labeled them A through F in his observation journal, letters clear and sharp, then listed a topical poison next to each. Already he knew the ache of sinew knit back together by fool-hearted faith, the shock of the whip and the panic of a collapsed lung. That his instructors thought he would accept knowledge of the most virulent acids and solvents from books alone was laughable. Only direct experience would suffice.

One did not temper a blade through the flapping lips of a mindless tutor. It took the hammer’s apathy, the oven’s heat.

And just as any trusty knife, Hubert made not a sound. Not a whimper for the blistering bite of the manchineel acid seeping into his skin, not a gasp when his hands trembled and spilled the boiling disinfectant across his knees, and as he swept a swatch of Almyran stinging tree down his sweat-slick shin and watched the skin bloom into slaughter, he did not even blink. Every square inch of unimaginable pain proved itself, minute after minute, entirely bearable. 

The world could do no worse to him. He would ensure it.

  


* * *

  


The sun’s fury fades in fits and sparks, a trickle of magic down his cheeks, down his palms. The roar dims until it is only his own heart trapped in his ears, the patter all wrong yet familiar. Shock. 

**_“Linhardt!”_ **

Someone has set a length of cloth between his teeth, paltry gag that it is—or is he meant to scream? Difficult to be recalcitrant when everything is.

Sharp.

**_“Someone bring me a healer!”_ **

Magnesium, sparking into a light so bright and cold. Sputtering like the trick candles on Lady Edelgard’s cake, the one time he tried to celebrate, to make her smile. Pointless and bright and cold.

Warm hands close on his face, **_“Hubert I need you to—”_**

A riptide of sentiment washes all thought from his head, until there is only the vacant memory of brilliance, and Hubert raises his hands to see the raw horror of his arms. _Ah,_ he thinks, distantly aware he has begun screaming once more, _so they still bleed red under all that rot._ He will need to make note of it. 

His bangs slide away under seeking fingers, until all Hubert can see above him is a wild mop of marigold hair framed by a cloudless sky. **_“Breathe for me, Hubert. All will be well.”_**

Something is wrong with those hands. They stick to Hubert’s face, tacky with blood and the salt of his cheeks. They hesitate. Ferdinand von Aegir does not hesitate.

He bends his back, curling in and over Hubert, as similar to a shield as the lid of a coffin. His eyes shine with something Hubert needs to touch, needs to catalog—

**_“I have you.”_ **

He does. For a moment, a single ragged breath, Hubert sees only the bloodied freckles of Ferdinand’s cheeks in the hushed shadow between their bodies, all the rest of the world blotted out.

Then the healers come and their feckless faith sinks into Hubert’s bones.

And Ferdinand does not follow.

  


—

  


There is nothing quite so humiliating as leaving a mage lashed to their sickbed under a spell of Silence. Just as a cat without its whiskers stews in putrid longing for revenge, so a Silenced mage sits and waits to pull the world’s strings once more. 

Hubert has been reasonable. He has endured an entire week of mindless monotony with nothing to occupy him beyond the occasional visit from one of the healers. He has been a model patient: no picking at the bandages, no straining his tender muscles with unauthorized stretches, no clenching his teeth against the nutritious gruel they spoon to his lips. 

Ants crawl under his skin. Not the prickle of newly knitted flesh in his arms, but the faint stirring of anxiety in his steadfast chest. Still no Edelgard for a post-battle report, no Ferdinand overburdened with flowers and his own overbearing presence. Hubert prefers it this way; he has no use for visitors. He only needs the time to pass. Swiftly.

He curls his fingers and relishes the sharp lash of agony that tears through the nerves. It will heal. He has lost a week, not a lifetime, of use. 

Maudlin, how the Silence has whittled him down to presence and absence, drifting in the space in between.

“Well! How is my favorite patient doing today?” Manuela sing-songs as she sweeps into the room. For the fourth day in a row, her mascara has left hastily dried smudges beneath her eyes. 

A battle gone to hell, a mass grave of casualties, and her chief aide out of commission — small wonder Edelgard has found no time for such niceties as a bedside visit. Ferdinand, too, always lays low with his troops after such a failure, relentlessly mending their spirits in tandem with his own.

 _“Just peachy,”_ she answers when he does little more than tilt his head in her direction. Her voice drops to a villainous baritone. _“And how is my favorite physician on this dreary day?_ Why thank you for asking, Hubert! Such a gentleman you are.”

Manuela’s fingers trail down one of his well-wrapped arms with a faint tickle of faith, just enough to make him shiver. It serves as a confirmation of reflexes, and he loathes it like the itch before a sneeze, that inescapable lapse of control. 

Newly assured that no tissue necrosis awaits beneath, Manuela frees the edge of the bandage and slowly unwinds it from shoulder to wrist. His hands are shrouded in loose cotton gloves, and not for the first time Hubert wonders if that is merely an aesthetic choice, to keep the nurses from seeing the full effects of advanced magic toxicity. He remembers looking down, down beyond the bloody wreck of his smoldering arms, to see his hands still slicked with pitch, his nail beds still perfect little voids in mockery of a lady’s painted claws. There is a certain repellent effect in the most advanced stages of the disease; he really should be recording his findings. That it likely preserved his hands from further irreparable damage is neither here nor there.

Today his arms are simply. Pale. 

There is scarring, of course—any frantic battlefield triage will always put cosmetic concerns well out of mind—but the healthy pinked skin twisting around the darker blotches of red never ceases to surprise him. 

“Please play along today,” Manuela begs tiredly as she uncaps a familiar jar of salve. The rancid stench of it hits like a slap; Hubert’s nose barely twitches. 

She dips two fingers into the foul concoction and smears it along his wounds, setting about firmly massaging it in while watching his face with what he imagines a mother’s beleaguered warmth must look like. “It’s healing well enough from what I can see. Care to be a big boy and tell me your pain level today?”

Each rewoven nerve burns with the memory of its end, each gentle press of muscle beneath skin like a transfusion of nitric acid.

“Fine.”

Her smile twitches. “Glad to hear it. Let’s go over that handy scale I taught you one more time, okay? A zero means you’re pain free. Are you telling me that the _third degree burns_ across a quarter of your body are _fine_ today? Just dandy, hmm?”

Manuela’s hands dig ever so gently into the tender meat of his bicep, and Hubert’s breath hitches in his throat. Pathetic.

“Let’s skip straight past mild and on to moderate pain. Ignoring that you’re all wrapped up for burial, this is the level where it would interfere with your job.”

Her hand closes over his mouth before he can argue. 

“Yes, yes, nothing would interfere with your job, I know, dear. But let us imagine you are a mere mortal paper-pusher, haunting the bureaucracy and still dreaming of the power to nitpick the world. You are wounded, you are weary. To have such pain is…uncomfortable? Distracting, even distressing? That would leave you at a Six.”

“The only thing _distressing_ me is your incessant questioning,” Hubert chokes out as her thumbs move to the fragile new skin of his inner elbow. 

Manuela’s eyes shine with fury as she forges on, louder this time. “At a Seven, it dominates all thoughts and interferes with your sleep. Have you been sleeping, Minister?”

“Which,” he grits out as levelly as he can manage, “Was the number for ‘unable to converse’?”

Her hands fall away, all clinical seriousness returning to her gaze now. “A Nine. Are you telling me the level is particularly excruciating today?”

No answer.

“You slimy little rat bastard!” She nearly smacks his shoulder as realization hits, diverting her blow to the bed beneath in a split second of professional goodwill. “What is _wrong_ with you—!”

“Manuela,” calls a new voice from the doorway, more tired than Hubert has ever heard its languid drawl. Linhardt sighs. “I need to speak with our most eminently excruciating patient. The other could use some company at the moment.”

As Manuela’s face shutters into agony, Hubert has only a moment to wonder who this other patient is before the woman straightens her back and turns away. She leaves the fresh bandages and burn salve on the table, trusting Linhardt to pick up where she left off, and flits from the room without another word.

Perhaps it was less of a slaughter than Hubert expected. With mass injuries, Manuela would be exhausted from hemorrhaging empathy and faith wherever she went, not furious and easily diverted to a single focus. 

Hubert has little time to ponder the question as Linhardt unceremoniously sinks into a chair, tears off Hubert’s glove, and presses into the tendons of Hubert’s palm like he’s trying to split a crab with his bare hands. 

“Explain this,” Linhardt announces, as if requesting knowledge from the universe rather than demanding it of Hubert himself. 

“It is.” Genuinely excruciating. Nerves half sewn in skin long dead. Hubert takes an even breath and concludes, “A hand.”

Linhardt’s gaze flicks over his face, calculating, recording, and then he finally lets go. He leans back in his chair and stares up at the ceiling. His voice wavers when he speaks again, with an emptiness Hubert prefers not to name. “I thought we had agreed it would be a grand bother if you collapsed.”

“My apologies for the inconvenience.”

“Yes. An inconvenience. Such a succinct description of all this.” His hand flops uselessly in Hubert’s direction.

A dull little laugh burbles in the back of Hubert’s throat. “My, my. Am I keeping you from your research?”

There is not a single drop of mirth, or warmth, or amity in the eyes that fall upon him. Linhardt pales the way he does on the battlefield, sick to death of blood, yet there is a fury in him still, as if his hands itch for a surgeon’s scalpel to pry Hubert apart until he finds the answers he seeks.

“What spell did you cast on that battlefield?” Linhardt asks with a tilt of his head, muddied thoughts weighing him back to earth. 

Hubert’s fingertips twitch in memory of that brilliant burn, nerve endings set alight after so many years, the pure white inferno screaming up his arms and out into the world beyond.

“One that got the job done.”

Without pause, Linhardt repeats the question. “What spell did you cast on that battlefield?”

It is not a question Hubert can answer.

Linhardt’s eyes flutter closed and he draws in a long breath. “Light magic comes in only two known derivations. An amplification of faith’s natural glow, useful as a sensory control tool, or a separation of lightning’s visual attributes from the underlying force, useful as a feint. Neither is common. Neither is to blame.”

He gestured roughly at Hubert’s hands. “A reason spell would not run away from you like that, and the toxicity damage would be up to your collarbone if it had. A faith spell from even the most incompetent sinner cannot cause this type of damage. It requires concentration. The moment yours lapsed, the magic would’ve shattered to nothing.”

“Conclusion: either it isn’t light magic, or it isn’t known. I’m not stupid, Hubert. If you nearly immolate yourself setting off a supernova on the battlefield, I won’t shrug it off as a mystery. The Goddess didn’t reach down at long last and try to swat you from existence.”

Hubert snorts, allowing his shoulders the indulgence of a shivering laugh. “Well done. Could I applaud you, I would—”

“I am not finished,” Linhardt snaps. “I know this is one of the little secrets you and Edelgard share. As if none of us see you running around with your chessboards and ciphers. I know that the men you cast it on burned alive in their skin. I know that you, the most technical caster I have ever met, lost all control of it. I do not know what you were thinking when you cast an unknown spell, but by the Saints, I am _praying_ you did not know what it would do.”

 _It got the job done,_ Hubert nearly repeats to finish the baffling circle of this conversation, yet a sickly dread stalls his tongue, all sweet honey and putrid rot. 

The anthill of anxiety in his chest hums to the pitch of a swarm. 

Linhardt is…trustworthy. This is not a matter he will share.

Hubert’s voice shivers, dry and aching, as he finally answers, “Something ancient. I have made certain…discoveries amid my research of Ailell’s folktales. I’m sure you know of the javelins of light. The tome does not deal with them directly, but preserved what appears to be a related branch in the tradition. It is foreign to the Goddess, and so cannot be considered faith, yet it obeys few rules of reason. Truly a fascinating phenomenon.”

“And what does this related branch do?”

“Is it not obvious?” Hubert carefully turns both palms upward as if in penance, feeling for all the world like he has missed an entire act at the theater. “As you said. It burns.”

“The precise translation. _Please.”_

Linhardt begs for nothing. He takes what he wants, be it rest or privacy or knowledge. He navigates with enviable disregard for all the world, and never once has Hubert heard him plead without a crafty whine betraying his tone as indulgence. A grease on the wheels of the cart that will carry him back to his books.

“It called it a Flash-bang,” Hubert recounts from his painstaking translations of the archaic Argathan script. The book had nearly fallen apart in his hands, eager for oblivion before Hubert had copied out even the first page. “For blinding.”

“Were there illustrations? Of the mechanisms of the eye, perhaps—”

A sliver of dark gratification twists Hubert’s lips into a vengeful smile. “Ah. Did it burn the enemy’s eyes from their sockets as well?” 

Now _that_ would be a useful technique, if only Hubert could devise a way of controlling the spell’s exponential growth. Had it separated properly from his hands, it would have torn down the advancing forces without any backlash. Refined even further, it would be a perfect fear tactic for public executions. An act of mercy, truly, to prevent the condemned from watching their own demise.

“Not quite,” Linhardt laughs. 

For a laugh it must be, a breath folded tight and released with such forsaken desperation, but Hubert has never heard such misery couched in mirth from Linhardt of all people. The other mage rakes a hand over his face, stares at the ceiling with a racing mind, and then shakes his head in decisive defeat. 

“I don’t particularly care about you, Hubert,” he says in a strange, reedy tone. “I don’t care if you want to experiment on yourself and set yourself to the pyre. Have at it. I’m likely enough to go out the same way. I don’t even care that you are a particularly miserable bother as long as you are a particularly miserable bother that I can _solve.”_

“Then what, precisely, has brought on this charming display of subpar bedside manner?”

To be kept here for this asinine display, bed-bound and unused despite the tactical value Hubert could still be lending Her Majesty, is growing beyond the bounds of obscenity and well into farce. He is not languishing like a toddler in time out for using an unapproved spell. Her Majesty would not bench him for anything so petty, would not prioritize government over his survival no matter how dearly he wishes the reverse, would not send Linhardt to give him this baffling dressing-down about his meager research potential. 

Miasma sparks at his fingertips, the Silence guttering out against his surge of fury. Something is wrong. 

“Linhardt. _Tell me.”_

  


—

  


When Hubert was small, his memories very low to the ground, he and his youngest cousins would slip into the halls of Vestra Manor to play Vespers. Each week had rules of its own, goals and dares and childhood cruelties, but at its impious core the game always involved sneaking about from dusk to dawn without their elders noticing. Nothing sparked more pride in a young Vestra than being the only one who could sit still at lessons the next day, skin untouched by the bruises and welts of those who got caught by their fathers.

Hubert won so often that the game began to bore him. His time was better spent filching offal from the butcher’s block to supply his anatomical experiments. Outside of chess, Hubert cannot say he ever played another game again.

Yet there is something of that childhood play here, now, in the way he lingers in this doorway night after night, certain of his failure as he waits for the axe to fall. Shallow breaths slip in and out, his lips a firm and twisted line. He is too tall for his memories to strike home, except for the one of marigolds blooming against a clear blue sky. All of it a game, unreal.

No. Only as real as the pain it brings.

There are no strangers wandering the halls after the evening meal, and no nurses on duty. None are needed for such model patients.

Hubert cannot yet dress on his own, limbs too stiff for the sleeves and too heavy without aid of a sling. It is nauseating to be cared for in such a way. He never requests it. Still, when the monastery bells toll for Vespers, Hubert slips his swollen fingers into the knots of his bindings and slithers into the halls, shucking all awareness of pain as easily as a second skin. There is no one to see him. He ensures there are no sounds to hear. 

He drifts to his marigold garden, to the room that has no candle to read by, though the curtains are never drawn and the moonlight lingers by the bed like a covetous lover. 

He does not step inside. 

Ferdinand sits with his head turned toward the window, his back stiff against the wall behind him as his hands rest limply in his lap. Everything about it is wrong. The silence, the lack of movement, the way the light catches not his freckles but the dampness of his cheeks, here where there is no one to watch him force his cheery smiles. His shoulders twitch once, a faint parody of the way a bratty youth once forcefully laughed off the world’s cruelty. 

Her Majesty discharged Ferdinand from the Adrestian military that morning. They are at war. They have no use for—

“Hello?” Ferdinand calls, head turning towards the doorway as if he feels the force of Hubert’s gaze as a tangible weight. His eyes shine in the moon’s soft glow, his greasy curls a crown of midnight glory. “Is someone there?”

Hubert cannot meet his gaze, spared of his own cowardice by sheer impossibility. Ferdinand stares through him and on into the hallway beyond, into some after-image that still lingers in those burnt-out pupils. Complete and total blindness, according to Linhardt’s final diagnosis. Not even a basic awareness of light and shadow. It is not a spell, not an onset of cataracts, not the fool glory of staring into the sun. Ferdinand simply planted himself between Hubert and his runaway hubris, let Hubert cower bloody in his shadow as the flash-bang burst and burned Ferdinand’s future to cinders.

Only one of them truly deserves to serve Her Majesty now.

“You can come in, if you please. Are you also a patient? The wounded from a new battle?” When no answer comes, Ferdinand rubs at the back of his neck. “Ah. Just the wind. Talking to yourself again, you fool…”

Would that he were the wind in truth, when it can whisper through Ferdinand’s room unashamed and bring the kiss of the garden’s flowers as its offering. The sun, the stars, all the world claims its right to creep in through Ferdinand’s window as an unworthy penitent, yet Hubert cannot manage to take one single step past the threshold. He cannot speak the words of—no, _apology_ it cannot be, when his jaw locks around sentiment that would spill thick as curdled blood.

For the truth is this: nothing has changed. This is the way things have always been. Hubert kills and maims and erases, and it does not matter that Ferdinand was not selected for elimination, that he wandered into the path of that spell. Hubert’s victims are those with no further use to the nation. 

Ferdinand has become his victim.

Therefore.

The finality of it slides through Hubert’s lungs like a bread knife, a ragged-edged brutality in a ceaseless, steady saw. Ferdinand von Aegir. Useless. He cannot even string them into a proper sentence, cannot navigate around the acid-rot irony of this _sentiment_ in his chest, for how often did he beg Edelgard for permission to take the Aegir boy’s head from his shoulders? To rip out his shameless tongue, slip arsenic into his tea? 

There is still an earmarked portion of rat poison in Hubert’s kit, in its properly undetectable dosages, so he can put down the rat king’s heir at a moment’s notice. Even once Ferdinand’s lack of seditious instinct rang clear, still Hubert argued his dangers outweighed his pitiful offerings.

And now his martial prowess, his tactical acumen, his innate goodwill, his faith, his loyalty and friendship and brutal bleeding heart, all of those oft-mocked talents will slip through Hubert’s soot-stained fingers and leave the Empire so much poorer. No more boasts in the training hall, no more bickering in the war room, no more lectures in the stable stall and diatribes at the tea table. No more marigolds braced impossibly against a winter sky. 

Hubert has never imagined an _after,_ but to think there will be no glory there, no relentless optimism to kindle the day, only the shuddering silence that has haunted Hubert from the moment he woke whole and hale after the sun should have swallowed him whole—No.

A commoner’s pension and a name effaced from history _cannot_ be Ferdinand’s lot.

They are at war; there can be no waste. Ferdinand is not broken, merely—tempered. A weapon of uncommon shape, but the forge of war cares little for such things.

And if Hubert cannot fix this in truth, if all his arcane prowess will not let him curl his harrowed fingers into his own eye socket and pry forth a bauble to trade, if the gory slop of his chest will not whisper an answer among all its guilty screams, then he will fix it in semblance. A magician’s trick to tie a wandering spirit back to the land, for Ferdinand’s pride and longing have never wavered, so the only ingredient left is a purpose.

And purpose Hubert has in spades.

Ferdinand will be perfect. Even now in his agony, he makes not a sound. Not a whimper of complaint after weeks of confinement, not a gasp when the shutters clatter with the wind’s sudden howl, and as Hubert at last stalks into the room to kneel unknown at his feet, he does not even blink. 

_This, too, will be bearable._

_The world will do no worse to you. I will ensure it._

**Author's Note:**

> @aureafila


End file.
